A clearing, a detecting, a completing,

A largeness lived and not conceived, a space

That is an instant nature, brilliantly.

XXIV

Integration for integration, the great arms

Of the armies, the solid men, make big the fable.

This is their captain and philosopher,

He that is fortelleze, though he be

Hard to perceive and harder still to touch.

XXV

Last night at the end of night and in the sky,

The lesser night, the less than morning light,

Fell on him, high and cold, searching for what

Was native to him in that height, searching

The pleasure of his spirit in the cold.

XXVI

How singular he was as man, how large,

If nothing more than that, for the moment, large

In my presence, the companion of presences

Greater than mine, of his demanding, head

And, of human realizings, rugged roy …

So-And-So Reclining on Her Couch

On her side, reclining on her elbow.

This mechanism, this apparition,

Suppose we call it Projection A.

She floats in air at the level of

The eye, completely anonymous,

Born, as she was, at twenty-one,

Without lineage or language, only

The curving of her hip, as motionless gesture,

Eyes dripping blue, so much to learn.

If just above her head there hung,

Suspended in air, the slightest crown

Of Gothic prong and practick bright,

The suspension, as in solid space,

The suspending hand withdrawn, would be

An invisible gesture. Let this be called

Projection B. To get at the thing

Without gestures is to get at it as

Idea. She floats in the contention, the flux

Between the thing as idea and

The idea as thing. She is half who made her.

This is the final Projection, C.

The arrangement contains the desire of

The artist. But one confides in what has no

Concealed creator. One walks easily

The unpainted shore, accepts the world

As anything but sculpture. Good-bye,

Mrs. Pappadopoulos, and thanks.

No Possum, No Sop, No Taters

He is not here, the old sun,

As absent as if we were asleep.

The field is frozen. The leaves are dry.

Bad is final in this light.

In this bleak air the broken stalks

Have arms without hands. They have trunks

Without legs or, for that, without heads.

They have heads in which a captive cry

Is merely the moving of a tongue.

Snow sparkles like eyesight falling to earth,

Like seeing fallen brightly away.

The leaves hop, scraping on the ground.

It is deep January. The sky is hard.

The stalks are firmly rooted in ice.

It is in this solitude, a syllable,

Out of these gawky flitterings,

Intones its single emptiness,

The savagest hollow of winter-sound.

It is here, in this bad, that we reach

The last purity of the knowledge of good.

The crow looks rusty as he rises up.

Bright is the malice in his eye …

One joins him there for company.

But at a distance, in another tree.

The Lack of Repose

A young man seated at his table